


Cave Lion

by lynndyre



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Animal Transformation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Preslash on account of lion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-26 02:59:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17737709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: There is a lion in the Greenwood.





	Cave Lion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nuinzilien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nuinzilien/gifts).



> For visual ref, here is Celeborn - [Panthera spelaea](https://prehistoric-fauna.com/Panthera-leo-spelaea), or the long-extinct Eurasian cave lion.

There is a lion in the Greenwood. He is strong, and he is very very old. And he is alone. His mate is gone, a memory of gold among silver trees; though he tracks her scent and her power to the great hill of fallen stones, where her voice bleeds from the broken masonry and echoes in the blowing dust. For a long time he paces the boundaries of the hill. But the dust and echoes are all that remain, and the deer do not venture close enough to hunt.

She is gone. He is not. He is seeking something new, now.

He is licking his paws clean, savouring the taste of venison when an elf finds him. A familiar shape, a familiar voice, but not one he must heed. The elf blinks at him, from the branch of a sister tree, and slowly looks away. There is no staring, no confrontation, no motion towards weapons. The lion settles more firmly across the thick branch, and watches, flexing one paw to idly shred into the soft bark- it parts with a satisfying resistance. The elf retreats.

The lion, pleased with both surrender and sensation, sharpens his front claws down the length of the tree's lower trunk, leaving deep, ribboned gouges. He tests a second tree, but the bark is crackly under his paws. The texture is better for scratching his face; he leaves the scent from his cheeks heavy on the bark. When he lopes away, it is towards the north. 

(Haldir, returning to East Lorien, and finds no Lord to offer his report to.)

The lion ranges, following invisible paths. He climbs the wider branches, marks the dark trunks, hunts the fattened deer who flourish where the Shadow has been burnt away. Time passes.

He skirts the households of men where they bite deep into the center of the forest. Their fires burn less cleanly, their tame animals are not for hunting, their fields too open. He edges closer towards the Greenwood's western edge, where the mountain range shows close above the thinnest points of the canopy. But there is a scent of men here also, of men and bears, and the lion, investigating the smell is caught beyond the edge of the trees by the bear itself.

Old as he is, strong as he is, a lion cannot fight a bear and win. He does not try. But the swipe of one huge paw catches his flank regardless, and the claws catch deep. From the trees, he roars a parting affront, but his blood runs in dark rivulets down the shadowed trunk, and make tiny pools in the leaf litter beneath. It coats his tongue as he licks the wound clean. 

He moves now with greater purpose, and greater caution. The spiders are few, now, but they dwell still in the deepest places of the forest, and they are drawn to the blood. Their ichor, when killed, mats in his fur, and tastes of poison.

Out of the narrows, past the roots of the forest mountains, avoiding the pockets of greatest darkness where Mirkwood still clings to its shed past. There is a heat building in his wounded flank. He needs a den. 

North is sanctuary. North is kinship, and aid. The lion crosses tree to tree, over the Enchanted River, never drinking though the water is a rushing lure. 

Here.

***

There is a strange cat in Eryn Lasgalen. It evades even Thranduil's patrols, who have sighted it only twice, though spoor and the remains of cat-killed deer have been found sporadically, moving northward. The woodmen of the narrows have seen nothing, and query sent to East Lorien returns an odd equivocation from the marchwardens, and nothing from Celeborn himself. 

It is far outside expected territory. Mountain lions are creatures of the far north, and true lions and their cousins creatures of the east- but even as the speaking peoples of the world are seeking new places, so too are the animals, whether driven from their ranges by hunger or the movement of Men, or seeking to expand into lands newly cleansed.

Whatever its reasons, the animal has troubled no elven settlements, nor come very near the woodsmen's homes. And so the cat remains merely a curiosity.

Until the day Thranduil is called to one of the feasting glens The smoke and scent of wine and meats must linger from the night before, and the great cat, limping, paces the confines of the clearing, sometimes investigating the covered firepit before returning to its constant motion. It is no catamount, and no living lion. It stands more than half the height of an elf, long-bodied, with a dark-tipped tail, a half mane. In the filtered light beneath the trees, its coat is a shadowed cream, but beneath full sun it might be near white. And beneath moonlight, it would be silver. 

Because it is an animal Thranduil has seen before. Long, long ago, and it was the impossibility of a vanished species even in the last days of the Second Age, when the armies of Lorien and the Woodland Realm began their northward trek from the wasted siege lands at the Black Gates.

Once only, when Thranduil had strayed to the far boundary of the depleted camp in the deep watches of the night, another shape had paced the sentry line, reflecting Tirion's light from silver-white fur, shaking its snowy half mane and huffing a low sound that made the horses toss their heads and stamp closer together.

As Thranduil steps within the circle of the clearing, the ancient lion lowers its head, opens its throat, and voices that same low, huffing call. Despite long fangs there is no threat to the sound, nor no hint of menace in the slow pacing gait as he comes to meet Thranduil. The Elvenking does not shy from the meeting, but even he is taken aback when the huge head butts at his stomach like a domestic cat, great jaws rubbing a greeting over his hands.

Gradually, Thranduil allows himself to be persuaded; lets his fingers sink deep into the ruff of fur at the lion's neck. At the creature's urging, he scratches gently at the heavy jaw, and behind the rounded, pivoting ears that even now track the movement of all his elves around and above them. Close up, the lion's eyes are as clear and fathomless as dark water, and they meet Thranduil's gaze with full courtesy before a wide, sandpaper tongue lathes his wrist. Close up, too, the reason behind the creature's limp is clear, as-yet unhealed souvenirs of an encounter with one of Beorn's kin, or his like.

"Do you come to us for aid, Master Lion?" The lion meets his eyes, and slowly, hind legs then fore, sinks down to lie in the leaves of the elven clearing. Thranduil lowers himself beside it, returning his hands to that great head. "Mireth! Ask one of the healers to join us."

The order is relayed, but the cat's ears no longer twitch at it. Instead it leans the whole weight of its face into Thranduil's hand, and angles so his fingers will catch the most desired patch of throat for scratching. Its breath is hot against his wrist, and damp, and the creature as a whole smells of wildness, musk, and injury. It pillows its head in his lap while the healer works, gouging slow furrows in the soil with its claws as the wound is tended.

In the end, against all logic, the lion walks beside the king back to the Woodland Halls, and ends by sprawling himself to his fullest extension across the floor of Thranduil's bathing chamber, dark-tipped tail teasing the water. He watches Thranduil, head down against his huge forepaws, then half-rolls, stopping when it pulls at his bandaged wounds. The mournful growl is nearly amusing, but Thranduil nonetheless divests his couch of pillows and leaves them to the lion before returning to the actual business of his court. 

There is no one but the lion to know if, on returning to his rooms that night, he joins pillows and beast on the floor. It drapes its heavy body across his legs, and sharpens its cheeks on his crown, and he cannot help but be pleased with its regard. Easy, constant touch is a luxury, for a widower king whose son lives far away. And the cat seems to crave contact just as much.

It makes for several strange weeks before the last of Thranduil's message queries is answered, as unpredictably as ever, in the form of Radagast appearing at the footbridge before Thranduil's doors, on a horse as brown as his robes and his name.

Thranduil greets him from a throne made all the more regal by the creature guarding its foot. "Aiwendil! Be welcome, as always, in these wods. I had sent for your help as one knowing much of strange animals, but I think instead we may need your help as a master of shapes. Or do I misjudge?"

The wizard passes a hand over his beard, while a fieldmouse escapes the long strands to vanish up Radagast's sleeve. The lion snaps its teeth together at the temptation, and licks its nose, though it makes no other motion towards the wizard or his musine companion. The wizard made a slow inspection, circling.

"No, Thranduil King, you do not misjudge." He paused. "I have heard-- There were arts said to have been taught and learned in Doriath under Melian's gaze. Never replicated in after years, but-" 

Thranduil nodded, and carded his fingers through his kinsman's mane. "I had begun to suspect. Especially when East Lorien finally admitted they had no word of him. But this is no magic I have seen. Though similar powers must exist still, else the Beornings would be simply Men."

The lion offered an irritated growl at the mention, but relented under the coaxing of Thranduil's fingers, and leaned up to lick at Thranduil's cheek, hidden scars rasping under his tongue. 

Radagast meanwhile stood with brows furrowed in thought, fingers twitching as with a calculation. Finally he crouched down, touching one finger to the lion's nose, spoke three words.

And Celeborn of Doriath fell forward out of the lion's shape in a spill of naked limbs and silver hair.

***

Once recovered of himself, and dressed in some of Thranduil's robes, Celeborn lets his kinsman press a cup of clear restorative brew into his hands and ensconce them both on the low couch, while Radagast possesses himself of the nearby chair. A plate of small hazlenut cakes is a temptation Celeborn can smell from a few feet away, in a craving for anything but meat, but he drinks his medicine and waits to be sure of his stomach. His eyes still spark with flashes of cat-vision, but they are fading.

"What was that spell?"

Celeborn blinks, and Thranduil sets a hand on his back- the same grounding touch he had offered the lion. It gains him the flash of a smile. "It was taught to me as a spell of discovery. Of finding other bodies your spirit might have chosen, and for centering, and self knowledge. And you were right, Aiwendil, it was Melian who taught us. Perhaps even with a Maia to teach it, we should have refrained. But I have done it successfully many times-" He broke off, catching Thranduil's look. "-one of which you saw? Yet this time I lost myself, utterly."

Radagast breaks apart one of the cakes, feeding a fragment up his sleeve before tasting a piece himself. It is Thranduil who speaks first.

"What did you seek to discover, that night outside the camp?"

Celeborn meets his gaze, there is much of those days they both remember. "Perhaps... where to go from there. Who I was, having survived the war, and who I needed to be in the new age. Not," he glances aside, to where shafts in the rock bring sunlight down to paint the wall in sunset gold, "dissimilar to now."

Radagast turns the remainder of the cake between his fingers.

"You will forgive me, I hope, but at that time, your lady was both strong and close to you?"

Celeborn's nails tighten, clawlike, around the cup, and Thranduil wraps his hands around Celeborn's fingers. The rings that press against Celeborn's skin are only metal, warm only from Thranduil's body, and Celeborn's thumb traces the twining branches of the largest.

"I looked for her. As a lion."

"As you would. In a spell to find yourself, and having lost the one who was part of your life, part of your thoughts for so long. What else did you do?"

"I wandered. Hunted. Fought a bear, badly." Thranduil laughs, and Celeborn swats his arm with all the ease of one who has slept on top of someone enough times to regard their person as fair game. Thranduil only laughs regardless, low and joyful, and Celeborn catches the wizard hiding his smile in his beard. "Came here."

Radagast's mouse ventures down to his fingers again, and he walks it between his hands as it steals crumbs of his cake. "Then, seeking a new path, and in need of an anchor, you turned to Melian's teachings, and they led you here."

Thranduil straightens in surprise beside him, but Celeborn can _feel_ the truth of the wizard's words sinking into his chest, into a place that has been hollow, and is just beginning to fill.

"Yes. They did."


End file.
